Chartbook 419 The old new Cold War is dead. Long live the new old Cold War: The political logic of Trumpian strategy.

As has been widely remarked, the National Security Strategy recently issued by the Trump administration is a radical and historically unprecedented document. It has caused many smart observers to scratch their heads wondering about its inner logic and whether it can even make sense from the point of view of US national interest.

In Foreign Affairs, Ivan Krastev in a typically pointed piece asks about Trump’s policy towards Europe:

Yet if the Trump administration’s aggressive courting of the European far right has yielded significant wins, it is also a risky bet. For one thing, stoking political polarization may result in a fragmented rather than a Trump-aligned Europe. It is far from clear that even illiberal leaders, starting with Orban himself, will align geopolitically with Trump, whether on Russia or China or on economic issues. At the same time, by lavishing support exclusively on ideologically aligned parties and leaders, the administration may be losing the bedrock pro-Americanism that has traditionally shored up support for Washington in critical parts of Europe.

Cam repeated those questions to me on the podcast this week.

I am an enthusiastic reader of National Security Strategies - nerd-historian bias here. I’ll never forget the shock of encountering the NSS issued by the first Trump administration back in 2017. As I remember slightly guiltily, reading it stopped what was supposed to be a chilled evening on Miami’s South Beach in its tracks.

Back in 2017, the Trump administration was effectively declaring the new Cold War. That was shocking compared to what went before. But it would go on to form a new historical continuity. Trump’s 2017 NSS was the lead up to the even more conventionally neoconservative stance of the Biden administration.

In 2025 the Trump administration adopts a far less conventional tone.

One way to understand the document is to see it as dividing the world into three geographic zones.

Over the Western hemisphere the US declares a proprietary interest. Without hesitation it invokes the Monroe doctrine and declares a “Trump corollary”. Given that Latin America includes x sovereign states, this is a staggeringly presumptuous declaration of power, backed by remarkably little actual substance.

With regard to the major antagonists of the 2017 NSS - China and Russia - the 2025 document blandly describes a world of great power bargaining. Ideological heat is kept to a minimum. Though, as we know, there is a power struggle going on in Washington, as far as the 2025 NSS is concerned, what was once called the “new Cold War” seems to be off. Instead of the old “new Cold War”, some kind of spheres of influence deal with China now seems to be the administration’s priority. The emphasis in the 2025 NSS is squarely on economic competition with China and stabilizing relations with Russia. The grander vision of historic competition that animated the 2017 document is gone.

Meanwhile the ideological heat in the 2025 NSS is reserved for … Europe.

Why? Aren’t the Europeans America’s friends? Why adopt such a polemical tone?

The answer surely is that as far as the culture warriors in the Trump administration are concerned, relations with Europe are not foreign relations at all. As Vance made clear in his notorious Munich Security Conference speech earlier in the year, MAGA regards the “struggles” of their analogues in Europe as their struggles. The enemies of the European far-right are their enemies. With regard to Europe - unlike China - not to politicize is not an option, because Europe’s political battlespace is really the same as that in the US.

This may sound radical and come as a shock. But it has sociology on its side.

There is an Atlanticist, liberal elite. Influence and social and cultural power do run both ways. And in most of Western Europe, the openly MAGA-affine political, cultural and social groupings are, in general, more (successfully) marginalized than in the US.

Viewed from a historical point of view, it is funny to hear people worrying about the new political tone in trans-Atlantic relations. In the old Cold War - the one that ran between 1945 and 1989 - it was after all completely common place for the US to opine strongly about European domestic politics and to intervene in non-too-subtle ways if it felt the balance was swinging the wrong way.

So, the new new Cold War is the old Cold War? The Trump administration wants to wind the clock back to the 1950s and have the strong, authoritarian, post-fascist currents of that era win the day?

I would take that as a first approximation.

But, the real difference is that MAGA does not preside over a consolidated hegemony at home any more than abroad. When Krastev points out that “by lavishing support exclusively on ideologically aligned parties and leaders, the administration may be losing the bedrock pro-Americanism that has traditionally shored up support for Washington in critical parts of Europe”, the obvious retort is surely: Isn’t the distinctive thing about the current moment that the Trump’s administration itself is not pro-American in any traditional sense? I don’t mean that Trump is a Russian asset. I mean that the zealots in his administration think of themselves as breaking with tradition and fighting for the soul of their country. And they see the traditional image of America held by Atlanticist centrist Europeans as part of the problem, as an external buttress of the liberal, East coast view of America that MAGA is determined to smash.